Related Articles

Online videos are a simple way for individuals and businesses to bring a message or product to millions of potential customers. Videos that catch the attention of some and then spread quickly on the Internet are said to have "gone viral." Viral videos create buzz and excitement and bring recognition of the company or person responsible for posting them. YouTube is a popular venue for these online videos, but businesses can also choose to self-host their own videos and promote them from their own website. However, there are some significant benefits to using YouTube instead.

Exposure

One of the primary advantages to using YouTube rather than self-hosted business videos for your marketing and promotion efforts is the amount of exposure you are likely to get on YouTube. On YouTube, a clever video placed in the right category can go viral with little to no effort on your part. With a self-hosted video, you will have to put much more of your own effort into making it get lots of attention. This does not mean that your YouTube video will automatically go viral on its own, but the likelihood is much greater.

Convenience

Another way in which YouTube is advantageous over self-hosted web videos is that YouTube is extremely simple to use. You only have to take a few basic steps to get a video up online. Create an account, sign in and upload your video and you're ready to go on YouTube. If you have your own business website, chances are that the process of posting video to your website is more complicated.

Links

One of the most important measurements of a website's success, aside from the number of sales it creates, is how much web traffic it receives. If you self-host, you have to bring people directly to your website to view your video. Doing so is redundant since the point of most business web videos is to create a buzz and drive traffic to your site in the first place. Furthermore, if your video goes viral on YouTube and you catch the attention of other webmasters, search engines will pick up on this fact and bump your website up in the search rankings. Additionally, a video posted on YouTube is on a site owned by Google, and Google tends to give its own sites a great deal of weight when it comes to search engine optimization.

Sustainability

Website sustainability is another issue that you may run into if you decide to self-host your video and it does happen to go viral. Website bandwidth may not be large enough to support hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors over a short period of time. YouTube's large dedicated servers makes it more likely that everyone who wants to view your video will be able to do so. If you self-host, your visitors may get an error message if they can't get onto your website immediately, and they may never return to see what you site has to offer.

About the Author

Katy Lewis has been a freelance writer since 2010, specializing in parenting, education and health. She holds a Bachelor of Science and Education in English from Northeastern State University. She also holds an Associate of Arts in English from Tulsa Community College.